Wrath of the Lich King Review Diary #2

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Why everyone should play a Death Knight.

By Alec Meer

It's a hard life, being a Death Knight. First you're conscripted into an undead army ruled over by a power-crazed traitor, then you're co-opted into a spot of genocide, then a rude awakening has you realise quite what a monster you've been. So off you go in search of redemption and friendship, only to be pelted with rotten fruit and spat on by the people you've now sworn to help. You know the theme tune to the '70s Incredible Hulk show, the mournful piano piece that's capable of reducing a grown man to tears? Play that on loop as you play a Death Knight. That'll get you in the right mood.

The DK is, of course, the new Wow class in Wrath of the Lich King, and as such it enjoys the renewed focus on storytelling and set-piece that makes WotLK such a surprisingly bold expansion. No other class gets the treatment this does. Even if you've zero interest in playing as a DK on an ongoing basis, putting aside a couple of hours to run through the self-contained gamelet that comprises the class's first three or so levels really is worth doing. In fact there are two absolute must-dos in Lich King, but the other – the level 73 Wrathgate quest – is very difficult to discuss without dropping a ton of spoilers. So, for this second review diary, we'll stick mostly to the Death Knight's epic introduction.

The DK's what's referred to as a Hero class, which means that he breaks away from the traditional role-playing archetypes of WoW's existing roster, and that he's only available to relatively veteran players. You'll need an existing level 55 character in order to create a Death Knight, and even then you're only allowed one per server. Fortunately, every DK – available to any WoW race; we particularly recommend the gnomes for the comedy value – begins the game at level 55, spared the lengthy run-up of every other class. He also kicks off in the past. For the DK's intro, WoW rewinds to the timeframe of its predecessor, the strategy game Warcraft III. You find yourself playing one of fallen human prince Arthas' armoured stooges, wreaking terror on Azeroth as the floppy-haired traitor gets a bit too comfortable in his nasty new Lich King booties. Yep, in your first minute of the game you get to meet the Lich King himself, who's surprisingly short for a destroyer of empires. Cue a half-hour of heavily scripted but genuinely spectacular monstrousness. You're tasked with assaulting the petrified humans far below the Death Knights' flying fortress with a sequence of escalating horrors, with Lichie doing his best to shout down your protesting conscience all the while. Duffing up soldiers and farmers eventually segues into slaying 100 innocents with a giant lightning cannon and culminates in a awesomely callous voyage of destruction atop a skeletal dragon. Hundreds will die. It's a long, long way from the faintly silly boar-punching that most people picture when they think of WoW.

Crucially, it also shows off two of Lich King's most important new features, which have been a little overlooked in all the gabbing about a new class and continent. The first is phasing, a clever tech that changes what you personally see on-screen even though you're in the same patch of a world as a bunch of other players who are seeing business as usual. It happens in major quests throughout Lich King. In one case, it involves you wandering nervously through the ranks of a huge ghost army that's invisible to anyone else. In another, specifically the end of the soon-to-be-legendary Wrathgate chain (again, we're being careful not spoil much) it results in one section of the Dragonblight zone being permanently and dramatically altered to your eyes. The Death Knight starting quests feature a ton of phasing. For instance, you're eventually dropped into the familiar, sickly environs of the Eastern Plaguelands, but, as far as you can see, devoid of players bar any Death Knights who happen to have taken the mission at the same time as you, and with all NPCs replaced by a scripted chat/fight between the Lich King and some key enemies. It's a technical hallucination, purely for your benefit. Truly clever stuff, and entirely in line with WotLK's philosophy of bringing the narrative meaningfulness of single-player role-playing into the freeform purposelessness of MMOs.